


Room With no View

by estepheia



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:06:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estepheia/pseuds/estepheia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thanks to Rupert, Ethan's stuck in the desert in a room with no view.<br/>Set after "A New Man", but before "Chosen". Written 2004</p>
            </blockquote>





	Room With no View

# Room with no View

When the blindfold falls, Ethan finds himself blinking into dazzling whiteness. He’s standing inside a cubicle measuring three yards by four, with three walls tiled in white and the fourth made of thick Plexiglas. On the other side of the glass there is a dead end corridor. The boys in olive who manhandled him here march off without a word, the tread of their boots echoing ominously. Ethan takes in his new home. There‘s a cot, a shelf, a sink, and a loo, that’s all. Everything is very Silence of the Lambs. Ethan is not flattered, he’s furious. This is all Rupert's fault.

Thanks to Rupert, Ethan is stuck in the desert in a room with no view. Instead of a window there are two CCTV cameras, one inside the cell and one on the other side of the glass. Bugger.

Staggering from the tranquilizers that blunted his magic and kept him docile during the transfer to Nevada, Ethan greets the surveillance cameras with a cocky salute, then goes through the expected spiel, examining the bare walls and floor, the small sink and the cot. The shelf holds a few toilet articles, like soap, washcloth, toothbrush and toothpaste. No razor, though.

Ethan settles down on the narrow bed, ankles crossed and arms folded under his head, smirking into the lens of the outside camera. The prison hasn't been built yet, that can hold Ethan Rayne, chaos mage extraordinaire, against his will. Sooner or later he'll find the weak link, the crack in the system, the inevitable loophole, and then he'll get out like a bat out of hell. It's only a matter of time.

Hours pass.

When he realizes that the lights won't dim for the night, Ethan snorts, turns to face the wall, fights down the queasy feeling in his stomach, and wills himself to sleep.

Days pass. Four, maybe five.

Glaringly-lit days and equally bright nights bleed into each other. The monotony is punctuated only by almost identical meals, an odd combination of lukewarm stew, bread, some bland fruit, and a weak cup of coffee, brought by guards whose immobile faces would make Buckingham Palace guardsmen proud. Ethan's questions and requests for books or cigarettes are met by stony silence, even when he turns on his charm.

Ethan attempts to measure the passage of time by dubbing the meals breakfast, lunch, or supper. It's rather ironic: a chaos mage trying to impose order and structure. It's also futile, because his jailers are messing with him: Sometimes he's ravenous when the food gets pushed through the door flap, and sometimes it feels like he's just eaten. There is definitely a method to this obfuscation of time. They seem to think that his powers peak or wane with the time of day or the cycle of the moon. As if he were a bleeding Wiccan. Ignorant American Council wannabees.

Ignorant or no, neither weak links, nor cracks nor loopholes appear, until one day Ethan wakes with a jolt. Strong hands are holding him down with crushing force, while a needle slides into his arm. Several unpleasant possibilities race through his mind: interrogation, torture, experiments or execution? Caught between defiance and plain old panic Ethan bucks and squirms, but he can feel the drug worm its way through his body, sapping his strength, slowing heartbeat and thoughts to a drowsy shuffle.

When they hoist him to his feet, Ethan is swaying. Shackles close round his wrists and ankles. The blindfold is next.

"You could have asked nicely," Ethan mutters, even though talking requires great effort.

"Quiet, three-oh-four." A nightstick slams down on Ethan's shoulder, with enough force to make his knees buckle, but the soldiers keep him upright.

Steered by his escort of six soldiers, Ethan staggers down several corridors until the sounds of their footsteps become hollow. When the blindfold and chains come off, Ethan finds himself in a huge, univinting shower room: white tiles, ceiling covered in bare water pipes that are studded with shower heads.

"Strip."

Ethan opens his mouth for a lewd retort, but reconsiders. Sometimes keeping one's mouth shut is the better part of valor. He awkwardly takes off his prison garb and waits, the orange bundle in his hands, for further instructions, shivering as cold air hits his skin.

"Five minutes," one of the jailers says, placing him a clean set of clothes, a towel and a bar of soap on a ledge.

Water spurts from one of the shower heads and steam billows up. Warm water. Ethan puts his bundle down on the ledge, picks up the soap and hastens towards the cascade. Under the unwavering stares of six stone-faces soldiers Ethan scrubs off the dirt and grime of the last few days, until the water is turned off.

Back in his cell a new bar of soap, a clean towel, and fresh underwear await him. Two new rolls of toilet paper sit on his shelf. The room reeks of disinfectant.

The dreaded questionings and experiments never happen, but shower day becomes a semi-regular occurance. They always come when he's asleep, and they always dope him up. Then it's shackles, shower, shackles. When they bark orders, they never address him by name. It's always 'Hostile 304.' Three-oh-four.

Does the shower day happen on a weekly basis? Every five days? Irregularly? Ethan decides to call this interval a week. Every time it happens he scratches a tiny mark into the paint of his cot with his thumbnail.

Weeks pass.

Ethan is bored.

There are so many things he misses, beside his magic: mostly someone to talk to, but also music, books, the stars in the sky. And what he wouldn’t give for a cigarette! He craves a smoke with the desperation of a drowning man.

He tries meditating or playing correspondence chess against himself, but the drugs mess with his ability to concentrate.

Humming music works for a while. Ethan replays the whole Pete Townshend repertoire in his head, then moves on to Led Zeppelin and Mott the Hoople, nimble fingers gripping invisible chords, plucking invisible strings. But it's not the same as actually hearing music, as feeling the beat with your whole body. Not by a mile.

For want of anything better to do he spends hours pacing up and down: step step step pivot, step step step pivot.

He doesn't sleep much—not in this unrelenting brightness—but he dozes a lot with his eyes closed, walking down memory lane and revisiting past glories. Why get up when there’s nothing to do but stare at blank walls?

Sometimes Ethan has a wank, but there’s little comfort in the act. While the drugs stir up disjointed and increasingly violent fantasies of hungry lips, parted thighs and slick holes, both male and female, they also blunt his ability to perform, leaving his flesh limp and recalcitrant in his hand. And besides, there’s something awfully undignified about jerking off under surveillance, especially when getting off seems to take forever.

Weeks turn into months.

Ethan's beard grows.

Bored beyond belief, Ethan invents names and back-stories for the clean-shaven soldier boys who bring him his meals.

He talks to them, even though they never answer, demands to see a lawyer, or pleads for newspapers, books, or paper and a fucking pen, anything. Of course none of the requested items ever arrive.

In an ostentatious huff, Ethan flushes his next meals down the loo. He learns several things from the experiment: As long as he doesn’t eat, his mind feels sharper, more alert, and he can dimly sense the well of power inside him, although he’s so far from tapping into it he might as well try climbing on a ladder to touch the moon. Also, his body has learned to depend on the drugs in his food. Without them he gets jittery, ready to jump out of his own skin. Ethan’s hunger strike is as futile as it is short lived.

As he sits on his cot, balancing the tray on his knees, Ethan decides to swallow his pride and dips his spoon into the bland vegetable stew. Let them think he's given up, that he'll be good from now on. Maybe they'll make a mistake some day. Maybe.

Months pass.

The incessant high-pitched hum of the neon lamps seems to get louder. The coffee smells disgusting so he pours it away. The toilet stinks as well. Ethan spends hours cleaning it with toilet paper and soap.

Ethan feels completely out of tune. His sleep cycle is erratic. Even with his eyes squeezed shut and his head buried in the pillow there's no escaping the glaring brightness of his cell. The light seems to pierce through the fabric of the blanket to drive nails through his eyelids. Once or twice he catches himself wishing he was blind.

Disturbing dreams begin to spill into his waking hours, explicit fantasies full of brutality and bright colors. It's as though the walls are acting like an empty canvas.

Self-recrimination rears its ugly head, causing him to dwell for hours on the question of where and when things started to go so utterly wrong.

He probably shouldn't have slipped Rupert that Mickey Fyarl. Mellowed by nostalgia and a few drinks, Ethan almost didn’t go through with it. But he happened to have the spell ready in his pocket and it seemed like a good idea at the time, a perfect opportunity for a bit of mayhem. Besides, good old Ripper was practically begging to be unleashed.

But of course the Fyarl incident was just the tip of the iceberg. The enmity between him and Giles is a long-standing tradition, solemnly upheld. Ethan carries his grudges with pride. But this never-ending mind-bending torture seems a steep price to pay for a few hours of Schadenfreude. This awful incarceraton is all Rupert's fault. If Ethan ever makes it out of here alive he’ll find his old friend and then he’ll lock him inside a coffin and bury him alive.

In a sudden fit of helpless rage, Ethan hurls his breakfast/lunch/supper against the wall with enough force to dent the stainless steel bowl. Stew splatters everywhere. The mess is satisfying, with small bits of carrot and potato clinging to every surface, even the camera. Nobody arrives to clean the cell and the stains coalesce into a perverted Rorschach test: Ethan’s eyes are inexorably drawn to it, he finds himself searching for meaningful patterns in those chaotic swirls. One blob of stew looks perversely like a headless lady with big tits and a stiff prick....

That’s when he knows he's losing his marbles. It’s not the solitary confinement. He can take that, has got some mental discipline, for crying out loud - no, it‘s got to be the drugs. They‘re hollowing him out from the inside. Making him three bricks short of a wall. Making him see things.

Oh God, he’ll never get out of here.

More months pass.

The walls start wavering and the air is full of noise.

One day, Ethan wakes up feeling feeble and queasy. An irritating barrage of smells turns his stomach: iodine, desinfectant, cigarette smoke. He barely makes it to the toilet bowl in time, vomits and retches until he's trembling with exhaustion. As he sits huddled on the floor, he notices the needle-marks and bruises that dot both forearms.

What did they do to him? He looks up to meet the eye of the camera, but the unblinking piece of electronic equipment grants no answers.

His arms heal and the bruises fade. The dreams do not.

In fact, they get more violent. He dreams of razor-sharp knives slicing deeply into living flesh, Rupert's or his own; Dreams of disemboweling and skinning all the pretty GI Joes who bring him his meals, of cutting their eyes out when they stare at him in the shower room. When he wakes from these crimson orgies of destruction, he sometimes finds that he spent himself in his sleep.

The images frighten and repulse him. Fill him with something he believed long lost: shame. Scared of losing his mind, Ethan concocts a desperate escape plan. It‘s a long shot, and it relies on the fact that his jailers never search his cell. And why should they? What would they expect to find? Summoning circles and magical runes scratched into the concrete floor with his bare nails? A skeleton key smuggled into his cell inside an apple? A Harry Potter type magic wand dropped off by a demonic carrier pigeon?

As long as he doesn’t give them a reason to suspect anything, they won't come looking. Right?

Of course one day they do. One day waking up feels like fighting his way out of quicksand. He’s dimly aware of a crushing weight pinning him down like a moth in a showcase. Fingers are prying his eyelids open and a painfully bright light is aimed at him, causing black dots to dance in front of his eyes. Ethan struggles, but a needle pricks his arm and he drowns in a blur of distorted images and sounds.

He can hear them turn the cell upside down. Afterwards they search him thoroughly, checking every aperture of his body. They find everything: his quill made from an apple stem and the magical scroll written with coffee on toilet paper; the thin string plaited from his hair; and they find the crude two-headed sculpture he fashioned from soap when the onlookers thought he was jerking off under his blanket.

Fists and booted feet connect with his flesh, but he feels no pain, just slips away into darkness.

When Ethan comes to his beard is gone and his head is shorn; his fingernails are trimmed to the quick. A new coat of paint has eradicated his improvised calendar. He turns to face the wall and weeps in frustration.

Months turn into years.

The cameras never tire. If the soldier boys tape everything that happens in Ethan's cell, the recordings of the two cameras should fill 12 four-hour tapes every day. That’s 84 tapes per week, and 336 tapes per month, 4368 tapes per year. That's a stack of tapes more than a hundred meters tall.

Or, if you spread them out over a flat surface, 49 tapes across and 89 tapes down, you get a rectangle of almost 900 square feet – with 7 tapes left over.

There is comfort in numbers.

Years pass.

The imaginary stack of video tapes climbs higher than the Eiffel tower.

One day, when 304 opens his eyes, there's someone standing on the other side of the Plexiglass wall: Deirdre. She watching him in silent reproach. Only it can't be, because Deirdre is dead, just like the rest of them, just like Randall, Philip, and Thomas, turned into a puddle of goo by Eyghon. It's the final straw. Ethan whimperes and curls into a ball, willing the hallucination to go away. When he dares look again, Deirdre is gone, but Ethan knows she'll be back.

A few mealtimes later she's standing on his side of the glass, close enough that he can smell her perfume. "Hello Ethan. Did you miss me?"

Ethan shakes his head, then lifts his gaze to the nearest camera. "Please, I need a bible. It's important. Please?"

Deirdre shakes her head, making a disapproving, clucking noise, then she disappears in a brief flash of light.

The bible arrives with the next stew. Ethan touches it reverently, fingers the binding, and flicks through the pages. Good, strong paper. He hasn't touched one of these in over thirty years. Ethan smiles and opens the book to read. A few hours later he yawns, snaps it shut and crawls underneath his blanket, clutching the book possessively.

The paper is sharp, but it's difficult to make deep cuts, especially while pretending to be asleep under his blanket. He manages to slash his wrists and lose a few pints of blood, but they barge into his cell before he can cut his own throat.

They patch him up, drug him to his eyeballs, and put him in a strait-jacket, so he can't rip off the bandages. They also take his blanket away.

Ethan would weep with despair but he has no tears left.

Deirdre doesn't come back, but one day there's a man sitting on his cot, fastidiously brushing an imaginary bit of lint off the lapel of his slightly outdated bugundy red suit.

"You're not real," Ethan tells him haltingly. "And besides, you're dead."

"True," Mr. Trick replies with a shrug. "And you, Mr. Rayne, are crazy." The apparition flashes his pearly whites. "See? Nobody's perfect."

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to: Tania, Josey, Andrea, Ludditerobot and Lisa.
> 
> Author's Note 1: Anyone who feels that this ending is way too depressing may imagine that Mr. Trick aka The First makes a deal with Ethan and subsequently engineers his release/escape. That's the ending I wrote initially, but I scrapped it because I thought this ending is more powerful. 
> 
> Written for niuserre who requested:  
> 1\. Setting: Either pre-BtVS or post-Chosen  
> 2\. Acceptable rating range: Any  
> 3\. Two additonal requests: Knives and alcohol  
> 4\. One thing you don't want to see, if any: Ethan/Giles


End file.
